Policy Engine as a Service (PEaaS): An Approach to a Reliable Policy Management Framework in Cloud Computing Environments

Security challenges are the most important obstacle for advancement of IT-based on-demand services and cloud computing as an emerging technology. In this paper, a structural policy management engine has been introduced to enhance the reliability of managing different policies in clouds and to provide standard and also dedicated security levels (rings) based on capabilities of the cloud provider and requirements of cloud customers. Accordingly, policy database has been designed based on capabilities and policy engine establishes appropriate relations between policy database and SLA engine to provide security terms as a service. Furthermore, policy match maker and reasoning engine have been designed for syntactic and semantic analysis of security requests based on three-levels of protection ontology to enhance the process of policy management in clouds.